Samsung thinks this watch could be the future of health

Electronics giant Samsung took on Wednesday its biggest step yet into the rapidly growing field of “wearable” health devices, unveiling a prototype for a smartwatch that can track key vital signs and a software platform that will allow researchers to analyze the massive amounts of data generated by wearers.

During a presentation in San Francisco, Samsung introduced the Simband, a watch that isn’t for sale but an example, the company said, of products still to come. It can track key vital signs: heart rate, heart rate regularity, skin temperature, oxygen levels and carbon dioxide levels. And thanks to an attachable battery, the watch does not need to be taken off to be recharged, allowing it to monitor a user’s body 24/7.

Samsung also introduced the Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions, an open-data platform that allows devices and sensors to upload data to the cloud from any source. In other words, tons of real-time health information will be gathered in one place, an attempt to break from the trend of separate devices collecting data sets without sharing them with each other.